Anne Clare Wilbraham Woods
by angie sylvie
Summary: Fanfiction based on "Maurice" by E.M. Forster. Anne's musings on marriage and marital relations, plus a discovery in the Blue Room. Characters: Anne Durham, Clive Durham, Maurice Hall in absentia .


She'd attended the finest ladies' academy, followed by finishing school on the continent. Upon completing her education, as a reward, Papa had allowed her a short tour of Greece (chaperoned by her eminently sensible maiden aunt, of course.)

It was on a dull night in at their hotel in Athens that she first saw Clive.

Anne was sitting at a felt-covered table in the guests' drawing-room, partnered at whist with a deaf and superannuated old Colonel that her aunt had befriended. She'd sighed, stifled a yawn and glanced up - straight into the amused and rather raffishly droll-looking blue eyes of a young gentleman. Leaning his elbow against the mantelpiece in that way that men do, he'd been talking quite intently with a group of other men who had all managed to evade the tender clutches of the card-table.

He looked away from the conversation and straight at her, as if he'd known all along that she was there and had merely been waiting for his moment.

_Isn't this quite hilariously awful? _his one raised eyebrow and quirked mouth seemed to ask. _Aren't these people the most frightful bores and don't we both know it?_

Anne felt her face pink up. A wash of surprised, pleasurable anticipation ran through her, so strong that she could hardly suppress a shiver. She knew, just knew, that something was about to happen. This was the moment.

Her real life, beginning at last.

Installed in London for the season, Anne made her debut into society. A sparkling calendar awaited her. Balls, soirees, the theatre, a ceaseless round of dress fittings, shopping and afternoon teas at the Savoy with friends, her mother and sisters. It was all a great deal of fun and she hardly missed home and the sound and smell of the sea at all.

Of course she hadn't forgotten the intriguing young gentleman from Greece. Anne had but to drop the slenderest of maidenly hints and an introduction was swiftly arranged by members of the interested elder generation. By the next Wednesday Clive Durham, Esq. was seated at the Woods' own table for dinner - along with a suitable selection of other guests of course - but none of them interesting or attractive enough to distract the two young people from each other.

From that night on, there was a private understanding between them. Not long after, their betrothal was announced to the world.

Clive was gallant, attentive, charming - everything she could hope for in a lover. It had all gone so smoothly - courtship, engagement, marriage. Perhaps too smoothly, because she'd been so jolly pleased with herself and pride comes before a fall, after all.

And so it happened.

That easy road came to a shockingly abrupt halt on their wedding night. When Clive came to her in her chamber she'd thought he wanted to talk. It had been a most beautiful day and although she was tired she knew (or thought she did) the duties of a wife, and that these were to make herself agreeable and available as helpmeet to her husband whenever required, no matter what the hour.

He got into the bed beside her - well and all-right, they were married after all though Mama and Papa had always slept in separate bedrooms and it seemed a perfectly good arrangement to Anne.

As for what happened next - even now, months later, she could hardly think of it without wincing. She'd felt such a fool afterwards, yet so pathetically glad that she hadn't made a fuss or denied him.

_Why?_ she'd screamed inside her head. _Why are you doing this to me_?

Her distress was obvious - she couldn't hide it - and Clive, distraught and looking close to tears himself, had tried as gently as he could to explain to her that this was what occurred naturally between a married man and woman and from such a union children were brought forth into the world.

She could hardly believe it. He was telling her, that for every single human being on the face of the earth a man and a woman had had to do _that_? Her own parents had done it - what, five times she supposed as they had five daughters? Why had no one ever told her about this? Was Clive even telling the truth?

He left her at last and she spent the rest of the night crying into her pillow. Then in the morning, good daughter of the stiff-upper-lipped aristocracy as she was, she pulled herself together, went downstairs with head held high and chattered lightheartedly over breakfast as if nothing in the slightest untoward had happened.

Clive was his usual charming self but she could see the wariness in his eyes, the fear that she hated him. She could never hate him. She loved him, in fact. But something had changed forever. Her image of him was altered, fractured - she simply could not reconcile in her mind the panting, sweating, thrusting Clive from their encounter of the previous night with the urbane, intelligent, and oh-so-civilised version of the new day.

This schism was profound, and was to stay with her for the rest of her life.

He'd left her alone (in that way) for the rest of their wedding tour.

As soon as they returned home Anne had gone to her older, married sister in London with every intention of discussing this most delicate of marital issues rationally, clinically, calmly - only to collapse in hysterics as soon as they were alone, the sobs coming in great, gulping, uncontrollable gasps.

"My dear, whatever is it?" Elisabeth had cried, folding her favourite sister tightly into the shelter of her plump, maternal arms.

"You must know," Anne gasped out, raising red-rimmed eyes in a pale face made haggard and unattractive from weeping.

"Know what? Anne, really, you must try to calm yourself. Is it Clive?"

"Yes - no - I - Elisabeth, could you not have told me?"

"Told you what, darling?"

"You're my older sister, you might have said something! You have two little ones of your own! Beth please tell me, please, does it - _that_ - have to happen between all men and women? In order to bear children?"

Elisabeth cottoned on at last. "Oh...I see."

Anne burst into a fresh storm of tears. The older woman gently extricated herself, patted her sister on the arm and left the room for a moment. She returned with a particular volume from her husband's library.

"Anne, I'm so sorry for you. I didn't know either - at least not much. It's just not something that can be spoken of, you see. But you're a married woman now so it's proper that you read this."

Anne had taken the book away well-wrapped and hidden it at the bottom of one of her clothes chests. In some ways what she read there eased her worst fears. Clive wasn't some sort of monster, nor was she. What they did together at night - not terribly often thank goodness - was, as he had said, the normal way of things between man and wife.

But to think that her own mother! That sweet lady, so refined. It hardly seemed possible.

She had assumed that children just ...happened somehow, once you were married. Anne knew some women bore children out of wedlock, but had thought that their inherent badness and depravity had somehow brought such a fate down upon them of its own volition.

Her own former naivete, her utter lack of interest or curiosity, revolted her now.

In her unguarded moments Anne couldn't help thinking, with a kind of appalled fascination...so every man had one of - those - tucked away in the front of his trousers? Even Mr Borenius? Even Simcox? (That thought had made her laugh a little, despite herself.) Even Mr Hall, who looked so fresh and clean and athletic?

Obviously, she'd known men and women were different - she'd seen her sister's naked infants after all - and had idly wondered why. But to think that that little, tiny pink thing eventually turned into....Anne's head would spin and she'd feel a kind of sickness come over her. At times like that she'd turn her thoughts with forceful determination to Clive's political career, his constituency, planning a shooting weekend with guests at Penge, managing the repairs and the household staff.

There was so much to think about that was good and wholesome in life. She mustn't dwell on morbid topics. Clive was the most marvellous, considerate of husbands. She could only shudder at the thought of what the wife of a bad man must suffer. To think she that had doubted him, even been repelled by him. Then, mortified all over again, Anne would resolve to try and be an even better wife - more attentive, happier, brighter, more interested in everything Clive thought and did.

Clive was strange for months after Maurice Hall disappeared. Distracted, distant with her, irritable even - which he'd never been before. She tried to understand, she really did, after all Maurice had been Clive's "oldest and dearest" friend - so he said, frequently, but it always struck her as strange, if they were so very close, that Clive had barely spoken to Mr Hall at all in the time she'd known him.

Just that one visit to Penge for the cricket match - and admittedly, she and Clive had been the most dreadful hosts - then after that, nothing. It was as if Maurice Hall had dropped off the face of the earth. There was a flurry of activity to begin with. She knew Clive was making discreet enquiries and then there was all that lively speculation in the drawing-room between herself, Clive's mother and Pippa on what could have happened. The menfolk tried to hush them whenever they heard such talk, Clive especially looking most uncomfortable and Archie and Mr Borenius, if they were present, not much happier.

Anxious missives arrived from Maurice's family in town, seeking any information Clive could give. She'd felt so sorry for them but Clive had been unaccountably cold, refusing to see Mrs Hall or Maurice's sisters at all and only granting a brief interview to Arthur Chapman under sufferance.

After that, the Halls had melted away.

At some point she came to understand that Pippa and Mrs Durham had been told something - something that was being kept from her. She hated being treated like a child, and soon abandoned the subject of Mr Hall altogether, much to everyone else's relief it seemed.

Later she heard that he'd probably speculated on the stock market, been ruined and run off to the colonies to escape his creditors.

Anne had been busy in the Blue Room all morning, supervising its clearing-out. Making way for the soon-to-be new inhabitants of this neglected suite of disused bedrooms, studies and storage rooms that had once been the nursery wing and shortly would be so again. She had already decided that the Blue Room, being connected to the back stairs, would be simply perfect as the nurse's chamber. The nurse who was required because Anne was soon to be a mother. She felt afraid but also blessed, and already full of tender love for the little life growing inside her.

It had all been worth it, for this.

"Milly!" she called, straightening up awkwardly. "Bring another waste-basket!"

The drawers were simply stuffed with old papers, and naturally the servants couldn't be left to dispose of them, in case any should prove confidential. Goodness knows what was in there, surely most of it could be chucked out...anything she was unsure of she'd give to Clive to deal with later. She sneezed. "Oh and do bring up the carpet-sweeper will you? This place is simply a dust-bath."

Milly, looking affronted, bobbed a curtsey and disappeared off downstairs.

She was humming a lullaby to herself when she found it. A single sheet that fluttered out from a huge wodge of papers newly liberated from the bottom drawer. Whiter and newer-looking than the rest, almost as if it wanted to be found.

A note. From Maurice Hall, to Clive. Nothing unusual there...it imparted no particular information either, but the words used, those words so carelessly scrawled across the trembling page.

_My darling Clive...adore you...forever, Maurice._

The paper fell from her hand. She stared out of the window at the dripping tress for a long time, utterly still.

Milly's footsteps on the old, uncarpeted staircase and the bump-bump of the carpet sweeper being dragged up brought her back to some semblance of reality. Anne snatched up the note and crumpled it into her pocket. Very small, she mashed it up in her damp fist.

She didn't understand, not properly, and never would. The picture that had formed in her mind was incomplete, but nastily disturbing all the same.

_Maurice Hall, infatuated with my husband? But surely, the note is some sort of private joke. It must be._

On the face of it, the notion seemed patently absurd - yet all in a flash she knew it was true. Her heart beat faster, her breath wouldn't come. She felt behind her for the desk chair, sat down heavily.

"Madam, are you all right?" Milly put down the carpet sweeper and knelt at her side.

"Quite all right really...just a little breathless. No, honestly, don't fuss Milly. I'll be fine..."

But the girl was already gone, to fetch a glass of water and Clive too, probably.

Anne found that she didn't in the slightest wish to see him. Not yet.

She wrung her hands, stared into space, recalled a conversation from not long before the wedding. Trivial at the time, rank with meaning now.

Mrs Durham, when Anne told her about the friends they'd telephoned with the news that day: "Oh...Mr Hall, you say! Well, I've not heard of him this past half-year...Clive and Maurice were absolutely inseparable at varsity and for years afterward, like a couple of confirmed old bachelors my dear, you would have laughed...Pippa even feared Clive wouldn't marry at all. They did everything together, simply everything..."

Pippa: "Then one day, just like that, Mr Hall simply no longer featured. Some gentleman's disagreement, I suppose. Clive seemed quite tragic about it actually, he wouldn't discuss it at all, and we teased him a bit. It's so nice that we'll be seeing Maurice again, really. A little bit _gauche_ if you know what I mean Anne, but he did so please Clive, after all."

That comment had provoked a stir of quite unreasonable jealousy in Anne's breast, which was why she recalled it particularly.

_Clive's got me to please him now, thankyou very much_, she'd thought.

Mr Hall had seemed quite nice, but distant. Something in his eyes, a guardedness, a sadness almost, had made her believe quite wholeheartedly that he had an attachment, was uncertain of the girl and suffering for it.

_My much-vaunted feminine intuition_. The words falling like heavy, bitter stones into her mind. _Well you had it half right at any rate, Anne you stupid girl._

_But naturally, Clive could never countenance such an...intemperate and inappropriate affection. Surely that is why he cut Hall off. It must be._

"Mr Hall. Mr Maurice Hall." She spoke the words out loud. Her voice emerged oddly - the name, though unexceptional enough, sounded suddenly strange, alien, as though it were from a different language.

Somewhere deep inside a part of her turned quite, quite cold.


End file.
